Sharp Objects Is a Map of Suppressed Female Rage

I have been told this countless times: by supervisors, by sexual partners, by Urban Outfitters customer service representatives. (You try being put on hold for 90 minutes to return a pair of culottes.) I’ve heard it so many times that it feels less like an accusation and more like an official diagnosis, a chronic condition that I have to manage.

At first, this observation was incredibly hurtful—especially because a lot of the time, I didn’t think I felt angry at all. Yes, I’m more direct than the average person, and sure, I can get emotional when discussing something that I’m passionate about. But did that mean I was angry? I wasn’t sure, but I’d spend hours studying my Resting Bitch Face in the mirror nonetheless, practicing a smile that I’d hoped would made me look friendly but instead made me look like a bank teller being taken hostage.

One day, an old supervisor called me in for a meeting to tell me that one of my best employees was being taken off my desk. I had received no prior warning of this, and it would significantly impact work flow, so I asked him why this decision had been made—in a tone that was more curt than average, yes, but not at any higher volume than usual. He was chewing a piece of gum, and he snapped it as he responded.

I realized he was right: I was angry. Not just at him, and not just at that specific situation, but at everything. But the real question was: How could I not be?

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It's no secret that women are angry. It's also no secret that we have a lot to be angry about. The reasons for our anger are so wide-ranging and multitudinous that listing them would border on mundane. To borrow a much-used phrase, if you don’t know why women are angry, then you haven't been paying attention.

I was constantly reminded of my own rage, and female rage in general, while watching Sharp Objects, the HBO limited series that aired its final episode on Sunday.

In her forthcoming book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, Soraya Chemaly writes that anger “is like water. No matter how hard a person tries to dam, divert, or deny it, it will find a way, usually along the path of least resistance.” Sharp Objects is a topography of female rage: showing both where it can come from, and what paths it can take when it inevitably bursts through the dam.

These paths are embodied by its three main characters: Camille (Amy Adams), an embittered, alcoholic journalist on a quest to solve the murder of two little girls; her mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson), a honey-voiced, icy-veined Midwestern socialite; and Adora’s teenage daughter Amma (Eliza Scanlan), a small-town beauty whose rebellious nature masks sociopathic tendencies.

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All three grew up in a small Midwestern town where women are expected to do little but gossip, breed, and nurse minor painkiller addictions; all three are strong, willful, and hyper-competent women who have been denied any semblance of power; and all three resort to hurting either themselves or others to obtain it. Similarly, their suppressed rage goes either inward or outward, as Adams herself told IndieWire: “You’re either somebody who explodes or implodes… Are you an exploder or an imploder?”

Camille is a classic imploder. After the mysterious death of her sister Marian, Camille embarks on a slow process of self-destruction, becoming an alcoholic and having anonymous group sex with a bunch of football players in the woods. (Other critics have referred to this as a gang rape, but the show leaves the consensuality of the encounter purposefully ambiguous.) At the end of the first episode, she is revealed to be a cutter, a woman who has literally written the story of her rage on her flesh.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée treats this reveal as shocking; in reality, it is anything but. Chemaly writes that self-mutilation is a predominantly female expression of rage turned inward: Women are three times as likely to cut themselves as men are, and per a United Kingdom survey, one in six young women has dabbled in self-harm. “The desire to inflict pain on oneself is directly tied to self-disgust, a sense of worthlessness, and unexpressed rage,” she writes. Unable to save her sister or the parade of young dead girls who weave in and out of her life, Camille takes her rage out on the person she feels is most deserving.

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Camille’s mother Adora is also a portrait of suppressed female rage, her face a mask of Midwestern gentility. She has perfected what Chemaly calls “a cultivated feminine habit of prioritizing the needs of others and putting people at ease,” yet she, too, has plenty to be angry about. Adora was abandoned by Camille’s father at birth, forcing her into a caretaker role that she is, to say the least, less than suited for.

But instead of rejecting a traditional Midwestern female role, as Camille does, Adora leans the hell into it. On the surface, she is the ultimate doting housewife and mother, a flawless party host and constant refresher of drinks. But in one of Sharp Objects’ many chilling twists, she is revealed to be suffering from Munchausen by proxy, a mental illness in which a caretaker (usually a mother) slowly poisons a relative (usually a child) as a means of garnering attention or sympathy.

It's no secret that women are angry. It's also no secret that we have a lot to be angry about.

It’s easy to think of Munchausen by proxy as a horrifying aberration, the ultimate perversion of the mother-child bond. But you also don’t have to be a therapist to deduce that in a world where women, particularly mothers, are afforded little control over their own lives, the syndrome is an extreme manifestation of the desire to take control over someone else’s life. Rendered powerless by circumstance and culture, Adora tries to regain that power the only way she feels she can: In the guise of being the ultimate nurturer, she becomes an angel of death.

While Camille turns her anger upon herself and Adora channels it outward, Amma’s method is an amalgam of the two. She dabbles in typical teen acting-out, taking MDMA at parties and having sex with scuzzy boys; she flails, she cries, she beats her fists, she sticks candy in her sister’s hair. But when she is with her parents—particularly her mother, whose approval and attention she craves—she reverts to being a docile little girl, playing with dollhouses and wearing dresses with Peter Pan collars.

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Amma vacillates between being a girl and a woman, a highly sophisticated form of code-switching that is arguably the first lesson in being a woman that young girls ever get: In a culture where women are taught to be both highly sexualized and highly chaste, you have to be adept at both. Amma’s case is extreme; she goes back and forth, from a maelstrom of teen hormones to her mother’s “little doll to dress up,” ceding control to Adora because it is the only form of affection she knows.

“It’s easier to go along with what she wants,” Camille says. But what her mother wants is to make her very sick. This bind illustrates a dilemma that many women are forced to confront: Resist, and stand accused of being too difficult, too emotional, too angry—or give in, and run the risk of being taken advantage of.

In Rage Becomes Her, Chemaly returns again and again to an idea about the invisibility of women's anger: that if men knew how truly angry women were, they would be staggered. And in Sharp Objects, it’s clear that the men of Wind Gap refuse to acknowledge the true extent of the women’s anger, or even that women are capable of anger in general: The town sheriff refuses to investigate a child witness’s report of seeing “a woman in white” abduct one of the girls, and one of the victims’ fathers tells Camille: “Women around here, they don’t kill with their hands. They talk.”

But underestimating the extent of female anger has lethal consequences here. It's revealed that Amma is the killer, so full of suppressed rage that she takes her victims’ teeth out with pliers—something that Detective Willis (Chris Messina) had pointed out would be impossible for a woman to do.

There’s also a flip side to that message: One wonders what would happen to the Camilles and Adoras and Ammas of the world if they were allowed to lash out and snarl and scream, if their rage was treated as legitimate and worthwhile instead of something to be tamped down under lace and bows.

I think about this a lot. I think about how much less time I would’ve spent studying the contours of my face in the mirror, apologizing in meetings when people asked me what was wrong. I think about how much time I’ve spent trying to be pleasant when it shouldn’t have mattered one way or another how pleasant I was. I think about how hard I tried to be the best version of myself, for people who didn’t deserve to see that version at all. And I think about how I should’ve grabbed the gum out of that dude’s mouth the second he told me I was being irrational and stuck it on his dumb bald head.

I am still angry. How can I not be? The world hasn’t changed in any significant way for women; we still have plenty of reasons to be angry, and plenty of reasons not to show it. But I try to learn from my anger, to examine it, to identify its source. I try to treat my anger as a friend who has something important to teach me, because more often than not, it does. In Sharp Objects, at least, ignoring those lessons can be a matter of life or death.

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